Every year at this time, on the occasion of Passover, Jews around the
world relive the exodus from Egypt and their people’s journey from
slavery to freedom. This year the endeavor to remember never to take
freedom for granted got a gratuitous boost from the United Nations.
On April 3 and April 4, 2012, at the behest of modern Arab nations,
the U.N. convened a meeting in Geneva committed to turning back the
hands of time and keeping alive those ancient prejudices.

Over the past two days, the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the
Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People has sponsored a two-day
conference on the topic of Palestinian “political” prisoners held in
Israeli prisons. The Committee was created by the U.N. General
Assembly back in 1975 to implement the infamous Zionism-is-racism
resolution. While the resolution was rescinded 16 years later, the
committee marches on, boasting 49 U.N. states and observers as
members and unending funds courtesy of the General Assembly.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon sent Maxwell Gaylard, U.N. Deputy
Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, to open the
meeting on his behalf. Gaylard fawned: “I am pleased to send
greetings to all participants at this International Meeting on the
Question of Palestine.” He proceeded to “thank the Committee on the
Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People for
organizing this important discussion.”

With a room full of European diplomats, professional Israel-bashers
from “civil society,” Arab and Muslim state representatives, and
avowed anti-Semites — not mutually exclusive categories —
the “important discussion” took the following form.

The “keynote” address was delivered by Issa Qaraqe, the Minister for
Prisoners’ Affairs of the Palestinian Authority. He blithely asserted
that “there was a call at the highest level of the Israeli state for
concentration camps to be set up for the rounding up and
extermination of Palestinian people.” To ensure his message was
widely available the U.N. posted on their website his speech claiming
that “the Chief Rabbi of Israel” has called “for the establishment of
extermination camps for Palestinians,” that Israelis
advocate “prisoners should be gassed and exterminated,” and
that “Israel is waging a war of ethnic cleansing against all
humanity.” As to why there are any Palestinian prisoners, “the
prisoners only crime is to struggle for freedom and independence,”
said Qaraqe.

John Dugard, who served as U.N. “Special Rapporteur on the Situation
of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” from 2001 to
2008, openly embraced the destruction of the Jewish state by force,
using the one-state-solution lexicon of “Palestine/Israel.” He
referred to “Palestinian resistance fighters” as “freedom fighters.”
He railed against Israel for using the term “terrorists” — which he
put in quotation marks — to describe “those who engage in resistance
activities as combatants” or who “take up arms in pursuance of the
right of self-determination.”

The ambassador of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to the U.N.
in Geneva, Slimane Chikh, claimed that “we see ethnic
cleansing. . . . Jewish people have primacy and are being favored in
all parts of life,” while he fumed about “Judaized holy sites.”

Civil-society representative Shawqi Al Issa, director of the Ensan
Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Bethlehem, lectured: “The
League [of Nations] decided to give Palestine to European Jewish
migrants instead of developing it for its people who lived on this
land. In 1947 . . . more of the country was given to European Jewish
migrants. . . . There are confessions by Israel that there are
medical experiments done on prisoners. . . . Many are killed after
leaving prisons as a result of torture, diseases and experiments done
on them.”

When the combination of U.N. experts and officials, diplomats and non-
governmental participants, had finished analogizing Israelis to Nazis
and Palestinians to Holocaust victims, claiming Jews have no
historical ties to the land of Israel, and declaring open season on
Israeli men, women, and children in the name of self-determination,
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian’s lead U.N. representative, was given
a final word: “We thank the U.N. for organizing this very important
conference in this very important location of the U.N. . . . the
capital and center of human rights.”

In a world where human wrongs are called human rights, Mansour’s
declaration makes perfect sense. Fortunately, the message of Passover
offers us a way out of the U.N.’s moral morass: Teach your children
that the threat of servitude continues, that freedom is an imperative
for every human soul, and that good can triumph over evil. — Anne
Bayefsky is Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the
Holocaust.